LISNews Librarian And Information Science News

Article in the New York Times:

FOR the last seven years, I’ve lived in an old stone presbytery in France, south of the Loire Valley, in a village of fewer than 10 houses. I chose the place because next to the 15th-century house itself was a barn, partly torn down centuries ago, large enough to accommodate my library of some 30,000 books, assembled over six itinerant decades. I knew that once the books found their place, I would find mine.

Full article here.

Google Maps has satellite views but Microsoft Maps has bird's eye views. Excellent tool for giving directions to your library. You can drag the picture with the mouse and fly-over a city. Look up your house. If there is a bird's eye view you can even spin the picture and see your house from different angles.

Some examples:

Seattle Public Library

Powell's in Portland, Oregon

Strand bookstore in New York

The decision by a Sydney library to dump an exhibition about Palestinian refugees after a visit by counter-terrorism police the night before it opened has been criticised as an act of censorship. Sydney Morning Herald has the story.

Leichhardt Municipal Library was to launch the Al-Nakba pictorial exhibition last Friday. A local community group, Friends of Hebron, had developed the display of photos, poems and articles over eight months.

"We set up the exhibition at the library on Thursday night and the librarian … approved the exhibition, and said that it could be seen by children and other people who came into the library," said Carole Lawson, a Friends of Hebron member.

But that night, shortly before the library closed at 8pm, officers from the police counter-terrorism operations arrived at the library.

As a BoingBoing Wannabe (background info here) I figured I would just link directly to Boing Boing:

This month's Scientific American Mind unpacks the neurology of orgasm. It summarizes some very intriguing and also controversial research. For example, brain scans seem to show that orgasms aren't just about heightened arousal but also the silencing of the brain's "center of vigilance" to lose all inhibitions. From Scientific American Mind:

Full story at, you guessed it, Boing Boing.

This is library related. The original article was in Scientific American. Many libraries carry Scientific American.

If your internet provider tracks your surfing you may not want to read the article above. If that is the case you could read this article on microwaving vegetables.

The Bookworm, which operates several English-language library/bookstores in China, reports that the staff at the company's Chengdu branch, near the epicenter of Monday's earthquake, is safe.

The Bookworm is "co-ordinating our efforts to help the people of Sichuan during this difficult time," the store said. "The Bookworm Chengdu has become a focal point in assisting those groups currently providing on the ground support for those in Sichuan affected by the tragedy."

The first trans-Atlantic broadcast, on March 14, 1925; Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia’s reading of the comics in 1945; and Michael Jackson’s 1982 best-seller “Thriller” were among 25 recordings added Wednesday to the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry. See what else is new there from the Associated Press.

The Engineer Research and Development Center and the Topographic Engineering Center (TEC) Library has prepared a Web page at: http://www.tec.army.mil/Burma in support of the U.S. Navy/U.S. Marines/U.S. Department of State relief efforts in Myanmar, the Southeast Asian country formerly known as Burma. Flooding in the Irrawaddy delta caused by Cyclone Nargis with winds of 120 miles per hour, hit Yagon, Myanmar, (formerly known as Rangoon) May 3, and devastated the country. Current estimates are incomplete, but it is thought that there are more than 22,000 deaths, more than 40,000 people missing, and almost one million people homeless due to the high winds and flooding.

These maps and documents concern the geology, hydrology and geography of the country, and help the disaster engineering teams plan for establishing the supply dumps, hospital locations, transportation bottlenecks, landing zones and other areas needed in the relief efforts.

David Pogue article in the New York Times about the Chumby.

And to beat David Rothman to the punch might I suggest that the Chumby could be used as an ebook reader.

OK, you're a guy, and you like books...but what are the hundred books that guys who like books must read?

This website, the Art of Manliness provides what they think is the answer...men, do you agree? Is there a male consensus on what is a must-read book?

Mesa Public School librarians and their supporters demonstrated again Tuesday over job cuts and what they called the "dumbing down" of services for students.

The district, facing $13 million in cuts to the budget, plans to move librarians back to the classroom and replace them with aides. The district also plans to replace some nurses and speech experts with aides and assistants over the next three years, saving an estimated $3 million.

Protest organizer Ann Ewbank said she and others met with board president Rich Crandall and Superintendent Debra Duvall on Monday to voice concerns about the new plan.

Ewbank said the new advocacy group, Fund Our Future Arizona, would propose alternative librarian models before the next Mesa school board meeting, May 27 . AZ Central story.

Book review of: A Pocketful of History: Four Hundred Years of America--One State Quarter at a Time

History, Sartre said, is what happens behind our backs (or something to that effect). It's also something that jangles in our pockets, if we carry or save or even spend quarters from the 50 State Quarters Program.

We know this because Jim Noles has taken the time and expended great effort to write the winsome and valuable A Pocketful of History: Four Hundred Years of America—One State Quarter at a Time (Da Capo Press).

Following Canada's lead in the mid 1990s, the US government decided to issue, over a period of ten years, commemorative quarters representing some significant and representative event or symbol or enduring attribute of each of the fifty states, issued in the order in which all fifty states came into the union. There is more than one history at work here, that being a coin's depiction of a state's historical self-definition — but, in addition, much to our benefit, Noles has taken the time to tell us the stories behind the states' decisions and debates on which events or symbols to use, and how best to depict them.

Full review here.

Charter Communications, the fourth-largest cable system in the United States, has started telling its high-speed Internet customers that it is going to keep track of every site they visit on the Web.

The cable company will sell the data to a firm called NebuAd, which in turn will use it to show ads to Web-surfing Charter customers that are meant to be related to their interests. (Visit a knitting site yesterday and see yarn ads today.)

Charter started sending letters out to several hundred thousand customers in four markets: Fort Worth, Tex.; San Luis Obispo, Calif.; Oxford, Mass.; and Newtown, Conn. (The letters were first reported by DSLreports.com.)

Charter said it will start testing the system within 30 days and will make a decision whether to roll it out to its 2.8 million Internet customers a few months after that.

Full story here.

Web Worker Daily Points out 8 Search Engines you might not use. One neat thing they point to is altsearchengines.com. If you want to experiment with a whole slew of alternative search engines, try Altsearchengines.com. If you click on the “Verticals” tab there, you’ll find a huge collection of search engines focused on specific industries.

Stanford University Libraries has acquired the collection of books, papers and artifacts of the late Harvard paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, author of more than 20 books.

Gould spent his career at Harvard but decided before his death in 2002 that his work should go to a library that that made a commitment to digitize and cross-link all of his work, according to Rhonda Shearer, Gould's widow. Stanford was the only institution that made that commitment, she said.

"This is something that Steve wanted," Shearer said. "Even though he called himself a Luddite and really had anxiety about technology, he saw that for ideas to compete, they really had to be on the Internet."

University Librarian Michael Keller said, "The library's plan is to digitize Gould's articles as well as the sources he drew on, and cross-link the sources with his own writing. The goal will be make all of Gould's papers freely available over the Internet to anyone who wants to see them.

And this library in Massachusetts is one of them.

This feature in the Christian Science Monitor describes a small town (unnamed) library, on the second floor of a brick building over a fudge shop. Not much has changed in over 100 years. But there's still a lot to appreciate.

Marla Kay Houghteling remarks: "During my lifetime, I’ve been a card-carrying member of several small-town libraries – some adjoined to police stations, some to firehouses. But the best library combo is with a fudge shop.

The two women who alternate as librarians know nearly everyone who comes through the double doors. Instead of keeping a card in their possession, patrons have a card that remains in the drawer at the circulation desk.

When I moved to the area, I became No. 15,821. No number is ever retired, no card thrown out. When a book is checked out, the card in the sleeve at the back is slipped out and the borrower’s number and due date written there. One of the librarians has come across book cards with her number (a three-digit one) and due dates in 1939."

The stats are not good. The reading campaign is successful, but few of the books have come back to the library. Only 40 out of over 6,400 books have been returned to the library in Johor Baru where they were lent out.

What's a Malaysian librarian to do?? The Star reports.

Hey Hey Ho Ho This DRM Has Got To Go! DefectiveByDesign asks you to send a message to all libraries that they too should respect their patrons' freedom, and urges you to sign their open letter. To take action against your local library, they urge you to customize a letter from the template.

You know, for any other author, it'd be strange to make a movie trailer for a movie mentioned in the book. Then again, you could accuse Chuck Palahniuk of many things and normalcy really isn't one of them.

To promote his new book, Snuff, the author of Choke and Fight Club, Chuck had some folks make a trailer for a movie the character stars in. Now then, it should be noted that the character involved is an aging porn star so this trailer, while clean enough for YouTube, is so insanely not safe for work you'd be far better off watching it at home.

So pour a glass of cheap bubbly and viddy the trailer for The Wizard of Ass starring Cassie Wright, the vixen we know (not really) from such classics as Chitty Chitty Gang Bang and The Twilight Bone.

DailyLit, which offers up chunks of books on a daily basis, is now offering information from Wikipedia on various topics and bits of information.

Not exactly a library story, but here goes:

President Woodrow Wilson’s 1919 Pierce-Arrow limousine will be featured in the Woodrow Wilson Bridge Dedication Ceremony near Washington, D.C. on Thursday. Eric J. Vettel, Executive Director of the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library in Staunton, Virginia, says, “The Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library is honored that the Pierce-Arrow limousine will be featured in this significant ceremony. The original bridge was named to honor President Wilson, and we are pleased that he will continue to be remembered on the new bridge.” Story from WHSV.